Twitter stock breaks records over 3 days due to mobile ad prospects

Twitter's stock price rose to record levels three times in as many days. It closed today at $69.96, rising 8.4% over yesterday. In turn, the price closed 7.5% higher yesterday than the day before. The social media company's market valuation now stands at nearly $40 billion.

In all, Twitter's stock price has risen by 169% since the company held its initial public offering Nov. 6, when it opened at $26 a share. It immediately rose 73%. The IPO was one of the most closely watched in recent memory, drawing comparisons to Facebook's IPO.

Today's and yesterday's surge are due to investor belief in Twitter's advertising prospects. The company has plenty of room for ad growth, some analysts say. Cross-advertising programs with TV programs and networks are among the more enticing plans.

Not all analysts are on-board with the stock price. Some of them say the kissing-$70 price is bloated. Wunderlich Securities Inc. analyst Blake Harper pegs the real value of a Twitter share at $34. He cites a lack of a first earnings report post-going-public as his reasoning for more caution.




SOURCE: Bloomberg

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Samsung Galaxy Gear commercial implies a love interest with every smartwatch

Buckle your boots. You're in for the rad-est, snowboarding-est, most gratuitously romantical tech gear commercial you've ever seen. Samsung just released a commercial for its Galaxy Gear smartwatch that will make your heartstrings shudder. It's in fine keeping with the recent tech gear marketing trend of stopping just one nanometer short of directly shouting to the male segment, "This gadget will get you the girl!"

The commercial depicts a male snowboarder with a smartphone, a female snowboarder, and another male snowboarder with a Galaxy Gear. Guess who gets the girl. Hey, the snowboarding scenes are pretty sharp-looking.

The commercial dropped just four days before Christmas. The production comes out of Samsung's estimated USD $14 billion advertising and marketing budget for the year 2013, according to Reuters. The $227 billion company (market value) spent $4.3 billion just on ads in 2012 -- four times the amount spent by Apple, even though its global brand value is twice as big as Samsung's. Still, with $9.6 billion in operating profit in just Q3 2013, Samsung can afford to blow a little scratch on a cheesy advertising adventure.

The Galaxy Gear is the most well known of smartwatches -- and make no mistake, it is arguably a very worthy wearable -- but it is far from alone in the marketplace nor is it necessarily the best smartwatch for every user. Among the contenders are the Pebble, Sony's Smartwatch 2, Google's newly acquired WIMM watch, and Qualcomm's Toq. Check out SlashGear's Chris Burns' rundown of these smartwatch offerings for a quick comparison.



SOURCE: Samsung Mobile

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Announcing Promoted Accounts in Timeline for Twitter's

In 2010, we launched Promoted Accounts to help users discover businesses and people of interest, and to help advertisers build a highly engaged audience of Twitter followers. A study from earlier this year shows that users and businesses benefit from connecting on Twitter - in fact, 72% of the research participants said that they were more likely to make a future purchase from brands they follow or engage with on Twitter.

To help make it even easier for users and businesses to connect, we’ve been running a test that displays account recommendations on iOS and Android devices. These recommendations leverage Tweets as a call to action and display natively in the home timeline. For example, a new coffee shop could run a geo-targeted Promoted Accounts campaign in timeline to build awareness about their business and explain why users should follow them on Twitter.

After a successful test with a number of advertisers, we are excited to expand this beta to all advertisers globally starting today. This option is available in addition to the existing Promoted Accounts format that runs within the Who to Follow section.

As always, if you are an advertiser running a Promoted Account campaign, you will only be charged when a user follows your account.

Our hope is this enhancement to Promoted Accounts will make it easier for businesses to connect with the 76% of our users who access Twitter on their mobile device, and help users connect with the brands they care most about.



SOURCE: Twitter

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Trending iPad Air Sony PS4 Nexus 5 Moto G Microsoft Surface Hubs Apple Android Cars Phones iPhone “Air” concept is thin as two credit cards, light as a feather

A new iPhone concept has surfaced from Italian ad agency SET Solution, and they’re calling it the iPhone Air. We would love to see Apple produce something like this, assuming it’s even possible. It’s as thin as a couple of stacked credit cards, the display reaches all the way to the edges with nary a bevel in sight, and TouchID is integrated despite the size limitations. An agency can dream, can’t it?

The iPhone Air concept is 1.5mm thin at the top edge of the phone, tapering down to double that at 3mm at the bottom edge. It’s 13cm tall from top edge to bottom edge, and 6cm wide. It weighs a feather-light 70 grams. SET has poured a lot of effort into producing concept videos for the fictional iPhone Air, replete with dramatic piano and cinematic music.

The agency has been producing these concept videos on an ongoing basis. Apparently it is gunning for some big contracts with the gambit. One of the videos drives home the lightweight concept by showing it on a scale — balanced with an actual feather. The usual exterior features are all shown in high relief. The camera lens, speaker, volume buttons and port can all be seen. Plenty of profile views show the sliver-thin phone, giving us gadget tingles all over.

It’s the thinnest — and perhaps most optimistic — iPhone 6 concept we’ve seen to date. One concept we saw in March also emphasized borderlessness. The real iPhone 6 has been in development since the beginning of 2013.




SOURCE: Nowhere Else (French)
SOURCE: Slashgear

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iTunes Radio September launch tipped with full-screen takeover adverts

Apple’s iTunes Radio streaming service will launch in September with at least four high-profile brands including McDonald’s and Pepsi, sources claim, and listeners should expect to hear an audio advert every fifteen minutes and a video ad every hour. Announced at WWDC 2013 back in June, iTunes Radio takes on Pandora, Spotify and other streaming music services and will presumably be launched alongside iOS 7; according to Advertising Age, McDonald’s, Nissan, Pepsi, Procter & Gamble, and potentially up to two more brands will be first out of the gate with multi-million 12 month advertising deals.

According to the insiders familiar with Apple’s negotiations, there will be three types of advert users of iTunes Radio can expect to see. Most familiar are the audio and video adverts, which will interrupt playback periodically; Apple has supposedly tuned the video advert system so that the promotional content pops up when the user is most likely to be looking at their display, such as just after pressing play or skipping through tracks.

However, the third type of advert may be more controversial. Dubbed “slate” ads, they are apparently a full-screen takeover, bringing up an interactive iAd-style page that completely covers whatever the user was looking at before. These will be supported not only on iPhone and iPad, but on Apple TV, and iTunes on both Macs and Windows PCs.

It’s unclear how frequently the full-screen adverts will be shown, though it may be down to how much each brand is willing to pay. The sources say that Apple has a sliding scale depending on screen size: iPhone advertising will be cheapest, with Apple TV the most expensive.

From 2014, advertisers will be able to choose which devices their promotions show up on. The 4+ initial partners will have exclusivity until the end of the year, but as of next year Apple will be opening up its books, it’s said, with a minimum $1m buy-in tipped.

Those not keen on adverts but still wanting iTunes Radio support will be able to bypass the promos by subscribing to iTunes Match for $24.99 per year. A “buy track” button will also be displayed along with every song playing. 

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